First results were reached on the development of the SAUCE project. Even though there are lots of new features and improvements to research in the near future, here is the first approximation of the web tool we are developing. In the video you can see how virtual character skeletons are behaving around a virtual scene. 

Until now, we have not centered our efforts on making it visually pleasing. We have focused on the User Interface and the feedback the tool gives and the technology to control the characters behavior semi-autonomously. As can be seen and read on the video, the characters are controlled by a Behavior Tree Graph, which can be easily created from scratch by low coding and can become as complex as the user desires. The amount of different graph nodes is increasing as new necessities appear over the use of the tool. This makes it support more use cases. 

We have also worked on the creation of a digital environment for these virtual agents. As in the creation of behaviors for the characters, the creation of elements on the scene can be done with simple steps. Above all, we have always had in mind that the tool has to be accessible for everybody, independently of its knowledge of the field. 

In the last couple of weeks, the GTI has been progressively moving on to the next topic to be researched: motion stylization. At the end of the video there is a section where the way a virtual character “does” things can be tweaked. This modifications can be extracted from other animations, or directly tweaked by the user. The idea is to have this tweaks associated to emotions in the near future.